Robust State Sharing for Wide Area Distributed Applications

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1997Author
Topol, Brad Byer
Ahamad, Mustaque
Stasko, John T.
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In this article, we present the Mocha wide area computing
infrastructure we are currently developing. Mocha provides support
for robust shared objects on heterogeneous platforms, and utilizes
advanced distributed shared memory techniques for maintaining
consistency of shared objects that are replicated at multiple nodes to
improve performance. In addition, our system handles failures that we
feel will be common in wide area environments. For example, to ensure
that the state of an object is not lost due to a node failure, updated
state of the object can be disseminated to several other nodes. The
overhead of such state dissemination can be controlled based on the
level of availability needed for shared objects. We have used an
approach that makes use of multiple communication protocols to improve
the efficiency of shared object state transfers in Mocha. We also
provide an empirical evaluation of our prototype implementation for
both local and wide area networks and present a sample home service
application written with the system.